Explore Narnia through the 2015 C.S. Lewis Lecture, February 26
A world expert on British author and theologian C.S. Lewis will deliver the third annual C.S. Lewis Legacy Lecture on Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015 on the campus of Westminster College in Fulton, MO.
Dr. Michael Ward, Director of the C.S. Lewis Centre at Oxford University, will deliver two lectures, one at 11 a. m. and another at 7:30 p.m. The morning lecture will be held in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury and the evening lecture will be held in the Coulter Lecture Hall of the Coulter Science Center. The events are both free of charge and open to the public.
“Dr. Ward is a best-selling author and a popular Public Broadcasting Station commentator, as well as being an authority on C.S. Lewis,” says Dr. Cliff Cain, Harrod-C.S. Lewis Professor of Religious Studies and Chair of Westminster’s Department of Classics, Philosophy and Religious Studies. “We are fortunate he has agreed to deliver two lectures during his time with us.”
Dr. Ward’s first lecture in the morning is titled “The Theological Imagination of C.S. Lewis” and will focus on C.S. Lewis himself.
His evening lecture is titled Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. This lecture will center around Dr. Ward’s groundbreaking study on Lewis’s symbolic use of the medieval understanding of the universe in writing his Tales of Narnia. The study has provoked a major revaluation not only of the Chronicles but of Lewis’s whole literary and theological outlook.
The Chronicles of Narnia is Lewis’s seven-book series detailing the adventures of children in a fantasy world of magic, mythical beasts and talking animals.
About Dr. Ward
Dr. Ward is a Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall in the University of Oxford. He authored Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, was co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis and acted as presenter for the BBC television documentary, The Narnia Code. He is also a Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.
On the 50th anniversary of Lewis’s death, Dr. Ward unveiled a permanent memorial to him in Poet’s Corner Westminster. He is a member of the Steering Committee of The Wade Center at Wheaton College and a trustee of the G.K. Chesterton Library at Oxford. As an Anglican clergyman, he served as Chaplain of St. Peter’s College in the University of Oxford, Chaplain at Peterhouse in the University of Cambridge and resident Warden of The Kilns, Lewis’s Oxford home.
Dr. Ward holds a B.A. and M.A. in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford, an M.A. in Theology from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in Divinity from the University of St. Andrews.
According to Dr. Ward, one of his claims to fame is that he handed a pair of X-ray spectacles to Pierce Brosnan in the James Bond film, The World Is Not Enough. He has also been an extra in the Attenborough film Shadowland and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet.
About the Harrod-C.S. Lewis Legacy Lecture
The Harrod-C.S. Lewis Legacy Lecture and Professorship of Religious Studies were endowed in the fall of 2012 by James W. “Jim” Harrod, Westminster Class of 1957, and his wife Sharon from Horseshoe Bay, TX. The Harrod-C.S. Lewis Professor of Religious Studies researches, writes and teaches on the history, current condition and future of religion.
The Lectures are intended to honor the legacy of the late British theologian by engaging the campus community and the surrounding community in topics and issues that were important to him and that stimulated his writing.
